Blizzard gave a detailed outline of their upcoming team shooter Overwatch at Blizzcon today, delving into specifics about classes, maps, modes, and the philosophy they're bringing to their first FPS.
It's a six vs. six team shooter set 60 years in the future in a world of cartoon heroes and villains with wildly different abilities. You can play as a genius ape called Winston, or a teleporting rogue called Tracer, a sniper with a grappling hook, a samurai with a deadly bow. Overwatch derives its complexity from the interaction between these varied skillsets. Abilities are designed to be satisfying and useful when used individually, but can be game-winning when used in combination by a coordinated team.
Every map is objective-focused, so you'll be fighting to seize capture points and escort payloads (hello, Team Fortress 2). The maps are designed to be easily parsed to allow players to focus clearly on the heroes they're facing rather than shifting level geometry. Environments are based in vivid futuristic visions of real-world locations, and Blizzard want them to be relatable and lighthearted futuristic facsimiles of real world locations. A payload map set in London has attackers escorting a bomb to the base of Big Ben, and along the way you pass a big red bus with hover jets for wheels. There's an Egyptian map with a theme park arrangement of sphinxes and statues. There's a gorgeous map set around a Japanese temple, covered in bring pink blossom.
It's cute, and ideal for a game designed to be approachable to players that don't see themselves as shooter fans. As Blizzard projected in all caps onto the Blizzcon main stage screen, there is "NO DEATHMATCH". Philosophically, Metzen and Kaplan frame Overwatch as is a reaction against twitch-based modern military shooters. Metzen: "We have a long legacy of developing multiplayer games, and it came down to 'is it even possible to build a shooter that doesn't feel cynical, that doesn't feel cruel, that doesn't feel nasty. Can you build one that really promotes teamwork and relationship and having fun with your friends, and not getting killed with a thrown knife from halfway across the map as soon as you jump in."
A cast of characters that look like they've just blasted their way out of a Saturday morning cartoon certainly helps. Aside from a cockney accent that causes this British reporter physical pain, they're brilliantly realised. The art style was devised by one of Blizzard's star designers, Geoff Goodman, who created the Lich King and many other famous Blizzard characters. The aforementioned cockney, Tracer, is a spiky-haired waif who can teleport, throw sticky grenades and—brilliantly—deploy a time-reverse move that teleports her to her exact state three second in the past. A resource called Energy ticks up rapidly after you've used an ability, and series of ticks near the reticule let you know when you can use your abilities again.
Abilities can chain together in impressive ways. In one video, Blizzard showed Tracer teleporting from a ledge down to a payload, sticking a grenade to its defender, and then reversing time to put her back on the ledge as the grenade exploded. There's even greater potential for cross-character skill combos among the twelve existing heroes (with many more to come, Blizzard suggest). In a video of a full match shown at the end of today's presentation, the buildy dwarf character, Torbjorn, deployed his ultimate ability to resist incoming damage and increase his build speed, leapt on top of the payload and successfully built a turret on top of the moving objective. Another character threw a bubble shield onto the payload and the turret moved through the level, blasting defenders as they charged. Internally, Blizzard refer to this tactic as the "killdozer".

Comparisons to Team Fortress 2 are justified, but it's about time someone took on Valve's brilliant team shooter, and the sheer quantity and variety of Overwatch's characters is exciting. Kaplan and Metzen wouldn't talk about pricing, but it would seem mad to distribute Overwatch as a self-contained priced product with such a direct free competitor around, and there's obvious capacity for Overwatch to offer players an endless stream of new heroes and hero skins.
There are hints that Blizzard will emulate TF2's approach to narrative by telling Overwatch's story outside of the game. In-game, you can field characters that are technically mortal enemies on the same team, and field multiple instances of the same hero on a single team. In fact, you can technically field a team of six angry apes if you like, though Blizz don't want this to be tactically effective. Metzen suggests that the story could be advanced by more cinematics, not unlike the one Blizzard used to introduce the game today at Blizzcon. Players can absorb as much of the story as they like outside of the game, and then toy with those personalities in-game, as a kid might with action figures of their favourite cartoon series.
I've yet to play - check out Evan's upcoming hands-on for detailed impressions - but Overwatch is an instantly appealing prospect. Its light, earnest demeanour really plays to Blizzard's strengths, and it's a brave leap for Blizz, not into their first new universe for 17 years, but into a whole new genre. It goes into beta sometime next year.

Lastly here's the in Engine trailer of what the game play will be like

Fight for the FutureOverwatch is a team-based shooter where heroes do battle in a world of conflict.Welcome to Overwatch
Soldiers. Scientists. Adventurers. Oddities.
In a time of global crisis, an international task force of heroes banded together to restore peace to a war-torn world:
OVERWATCH.
It ended the crisis and helped to maintain peace in the decades that followed, inspiring an era of exploration, innovation, and discovery. But after many years, Overwatch’s influence waned, and it was eventually disbanded.
Overwatch is gone… but the world still needs heroes.Choose a Hero
Offense. Defense. Tank. Support.Overwatch features a wide array of unique heroes, ranging from a time-jumping adventurer, to an armored, rocket-hammer-wielding warrior, to a transcendent robot monk. Every hero plays differently, and mastering their abilities is the key to unlocking their potential. No two heroes are the same.Play Your Role
Whether you’re engaging in combat on the front line, providing defensive cover with your energy shield, or supporting your allies by amplifying their damage, every hero’s abilities are designed to be effective as part of a team. Learning to utilize your abilities in concert with your teammates’ is the key to victory.Team-Based Objectives
Teams of heroes do battle across the planet. From protecting the secrets of the mysterious Temple of Anubis, to safely escorting an EMP device through King’s Row, the world is your battlefield.

Payload - The attacking team’s objective is to move the payload to a delivery point, while the defenders must halt the attackers’ progress until time runs out.

Point Capture - Two teams battle over control of the map, one team on offense, the other on defense. The attackers’ goal is to capture critical objectives, while the defenders must maintain control over them until time runs out.

Twelve different characters are playable, including the teleporting Tracer shown in the screenshot above. For full descriptions and ability showcases of all the game’s characters, visit its official website.

During a press presentation for Overwatch at BlizzCon on Friday in Anaheim, California, Blizzard Senior Vice President Chris Metzen addressed whether the representation of women factored into Blizzard’s thinking when it was designing Overwatch’s characters, five of which are women (and one is a gorilla).
A press conference attendee asked: “There’s been a lot of conversation about female representation in gaming in the past couple years, I suppose. And I was wondering if that entered your thinking when you were designing [Overwatch] and the characters.”

“Totally,” Metzen began. “Absolutely. Our female and employees and… even my daughter calls me out… We were looking at old Warcraft stuff on YouTube, a cinematic the dragon aspects and my daughter’s like, ‘Why are they all in swimsuits?’ And I’m like, ‘Ugh, I don’t know, honey.’

“But I think we’re clear that we’re in an age where gaming is for everybody,” Metzen continued. “We build games for everybody. We want everyone to come and play. And increasingly in the world like people want to feel represented. People from all walks of life, from everywhere in the world. Boys and girls, everybody. And you know, we feel indebted to do our best to honor that. There’s a lot of room for growth, but specifically with Overwatch over the past year we’ve been very cognizant of that, like, trying not to oversexualize the female characters. I don’t know that we oversexualize the male characters. But it’s something we’re very sensitive to. We want that to be part of who we are, of what our brand looks like and appears to our community. I think Mike [Morhaime] talked in a roundabout way to that in his speech this morning. So it’s something we’re very cognizant of. We want girls to feel kick-butt and equally represented.”

A few steps away from where Overwatch was announced at BlizzCon, 600 PCs sat waiting for attendees to play it. That in and of itself deserves a golf clap. We usually have to endure months of marketing teases before we get our hands on a big game. Blizzard is admirably aggressive about showing off its first built-from-scratch thing in 18 years: I got to play all 12 characters at BlizzCon.
The expectations set by Overwatch’s trailer weren’t that far off: this is an FPS built on Blizzard’s unhidden affection for Team Fortress 2. There’s a capture-point mode, and a Payload-style mode actually called Payload. There’s a fast-moving, low-HP pipsqueak who fights at close range. The medic heals with a tether beam. There’s an archer sniper, and a second sniper with a scoped rifle. There’s a class that (as its ultimate ability) deploys a teleporter. There’s a character that builds a sentry turret, then hits it with a wrench to upgrade.
It’s easy to hold up these pieces of Overwatch, but in your hands, when all those pieces are in motion, Overwatch doesn’t feel like a TF2 clone. It doesn’t feel like it has Quake in its DNA in the way TF2 does. And where TF2’s nine classes operate as hard counters to one another in a kind of food chain (Pyro hunts Spy who stabs Medic who ubers Heavy or Demo in order to destroy an Engineer’s sentry), Overwatch’s heroes feel a little more like first-person packages of MOBA-like abilities who have looser relationships to one another.
There isn’t one character who’s in charge of turrets, for example. Actually, one of the characters is a turret: Bastion transforms into a static gun that can self-heal. He can also toss out a mobile mine a la COD: Black Ops’ RC car bomb. The best expression of Overwatch’s mechanical looseness is the fact that every imaginable kind of character movement is represented: jetpacking, wall-climbing, grappling-hooking, gliding, ability- and equipment-driven teleportation, a superjump, a dashing charge that pins enemies (like L4D2’s Charger).Too much of a good thing?

The best term I can pin on it is “mechanical flamboyance.” Overwatch’s diversity is refreshing and fun, but the big question is whether that variety will actually help Overwatch be a great competitive game. The incongruous abilities and characters may simply make it a wild, loose, and playful FPS that happens to have a higher than average skill ceiling.
I loved playing as Tracer, for example. She drew on my spontaneity and reflexes in a way that an FPS hasn’t since Tribes: Ascend. Tracer can teleport three successive times. In addition to that, her medium-length cooldown ability rewinds her position, health and ammo to what they were three seconds ago. At one point I phased through a Reinhardt’s front-facing energy shield, appearing behind him to get in a few shots. Then, as he shifted his shield to face me, I rewound time, phasing back through him again to deal even more damage. Tracer’s potential for nimble trickery and harassment is delightfully high.
But I have absolutely no clue if this artful dodging gels with a balanced game. The best competitive shooters are usually the most mechanically stripped-down (Quake, CS:GO), but then again, the best competitive MOBAs spread their complexity thick, across a hundred-some characters. Overwatch is taking a kitchen sink approach to multiplayer FPS, and it’ll be interesting to see how much of its 12 characters and dozens of abilities survive beta testing. At the very least it seems like Overwatch is going to need some sort of character drafting and banning system in high-level competitive play.
For now, this is a colorful, creative FPS with a level of polish that we associate with Blizzard games. There are a ton of touches that convey how far along Overwatch seems to be. I liked that Bastion’s basic movement animation, for example, jilted the first-person camera vertically as he walked, a reflection of his robotic movement.
I'll need to play it more before I can be sure whether Overwatch has a future as a competitive, skill-driven FPS, but for now Blizzard's twist on TF2 feels both reverential to that source material and original to me.

I played Blizzard's new FPS Overwatch at BlizzCon five times, the basis for my impressions on the game that I wrote over the weekend. But BlizzCon attendees also had a chance to play a game, and I was curious what they thought of Blizzard's first crack at a multiplayer FPS.

A rather oblique Twitter post has appeared on the Overwatch feed that shows a magazine cover with a shadowed figure on it. While nothing on the cover says anything about Overwatch, the appearance on its Twitter feed and the follow up post by a fan for people to scan the QR-code seems to indicate that a new character will be revealed soon. See what you think!

Blizzard announced two new playable characters for Overwatch at yesterday’s panel: Zarya, a new female tank with a particle cannon and McCree, a six-shooter carrying bounty hunter who’s clearly not one for modesty given the fact he wears the title of BAMF on his belt buckle. We had a chance to sample McCree for ourselves on the show floor of this year’s PAX East and the character definitely lives up to his chosen moniker.
Read more of Mike Bitton's Overwatch: Jesse McCree the BAMF Bounty Hunter.

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Starting with the basics, McCree carries a six-shooter that can be fanned at close range to take targets out quickly, but unlike characters like Tracer and Reaper, he’s also deadly accurate with single shots at medium to long range. This affords the character additional versatility, which is great, because he’s just as squishy as the other aforementioned characters.
McCree’s shift skill allows him to roll in a direction, though it’s on an eight second timer, which sounds short, but feels like forever. It’s clear the roll is meant to be used more for dodging in combat than as a means of travel. It appears his additional versatility comes at a price in mobility when compared to Reaper and Tracer.
McCree’s also got some pretty potent crowd control capability in his E skill, Flashbang. This skill stuns enemies in a small AoE and it can be crucial for setting up kills. It’s not as stylish as some of the stuff the other characters can do, but it gets the job done.
Finally, McCree’s ultimate ability is Deadeye. When triggering Deadeye, McCree holsters his six-shooter and focuses on all visible enemies in order to line up a kill shot. Pressing the fire button after initiating Deadeye will fire McCree’s pistol at all targets and targets that have been fully locked n will be killed instantly. I pulled off a Deadeye on three targets for a multi kill and I can tell you it was definitely as satisfying as it looks in the video clips.
We also had a chance to try out McCree on Overwatch’s newly unveiled map, Gibraltar. Unlike the previously announced maps, Gibraltar is a full payload map. It plays out like any TF2 payload map for those that are familiar. The attacking team attempts to push an object towards the enemy base along a predetermined path and the defending team is tasked with doing everything in their power to stop them. There wasn’t anything spectacular about the map, but the gameplay was definitely a step up from what I’m used to in Team Fortress 2.
For me, McCree is definitely a cool character that I can see myself playing a bunch, but he feels sort of like a one trick pony. McCree’s visual theme is executed strongly and enhances the experience, but I wouldn’t rank him amongst the most interesting or unique characters in the cast. My cool moments primarily came from successfully lining up Deadeye, but he doesn’t have a whole lot of interesting options or considerations when the skill is down. You basically pick off targets at mid range or you’re forced to fully commit in close range with little to no options of escape once you do.
If you’re an aggressive player, rolling into close range and landing a perfect Flashbang will almost assuredly land you a kill, but what happens after that isn’t so clear. Given McCree’s health, it’s hard for me to imagine him surviving after getting that kill, which made playing him on a Payload style map a bit frustrating at times. I was basically forced to stand back at range and try to pick off characters since they clumped up a lot more and trying to get in without getting vaporized was often impossible. When Deadeye was up, I would definitely rack up the kills if I wasn’t gibbed mid-lock, but I feel like I would have had a lot more fun with him on some of the other map types, and unfortunately we didn’t have a chance to play anything but Gibraltar at PAX.Michael Bitton / Michael began his career at the WarCry Network in 2005 as the site manager for several different WarCry fansite portals. In 2008, Michael worked for the startup magazine Massive Gamer as a columnist and online news editor. In June of 2009, Michael joined MMORPG.com as the site's Community Manager.

Few things are better than a Russian power lifter. Zarya is an iconic new addition into the Overwatch character list. She packs a massive punch and plays as a solid tank class in the game. At PAX East, Blizzard announced Zarya and McCree to the fans. Zarya is a very solid tank with mid-range attack abilities and some great defensive specials. In the psycho-paced game of Overwatch, Zarya will quickly become a fan favorite despite her low speed.
Read more of Garrett Fuller'sOverwatch: Zarya - Sure to be a Fan Favorite.

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Zarya’s offense is a huge Particle Cannon that has two types of attack. The first is her mediaum ranged laser which means a lot of moving around and trying to catch speedy players up close. It also leaves her open to attacks that are further away (snipers). The right click lobs particle bombs that have a small but deadly AOE effect. These work better if you are further away from a target however they use a lot more particle ammo than the beam. Her “Q” ability or Ultimate skill is a nasty Graviton Surge that pulls all the enemy characters in the area into small tight area and holds them there for a few seconds. Pairing this up with McCree's Deadeye can be very rewarding if pulled off right.
While Zarya’s offense capabilities are nasty, they are not nearly as effective as linking her with another characters for her defensive abilities. While characters like Reinhardt have the front shield for an extended time, Zarya puts a small defensive globe around herself when she wants to play defense. She also can put this globe on her teammates to protect them if needed. The Particle Barrier can be used as a final plan of defense, or used to protect a player going in for the kill. Timing is everything with Zarya, and she's definitely harder to play than the other tanks.
When playing Zarya in the match I found she works best as a sort of support or pocket tank. When teamed with McCree or someone like Tracer, Zarya finds her true potential. She can use that barrier to give her partners an extra second of protection. If you start to add these into something like Reaper’s Death Blossom it becomes brutal. He can then get into position using Zarya’s shield, then unleash his Q skill. In the meantime, Zarya is a threat in her own right. The beam attack of her cannon at close range can quickly kill multiple opponents. We had success with her on the offense side as she went in close and was able to get some kills on unsuspecting enemies. Also when working with Mike as he played McCree we were able to do some serious damage. Overall, Zarya is a pretty straight forward class. The technique comes in knowing when to use the barriers to maximum effect.
The question in all of Overwatch meta now is not who the strongest character in the game is, but what will be the best character combinations? Zarya with any class is effective. She can stay back and tank for support classes or move up on offense to not only protect killers, but do some killing herself. She can play the bait, let some damage get in on her, and then pop the shield. All the while, as she soaks up more damage, she outputs more as well. Making her this whole giant Russian snowball of potential damage. When combined with a healer, she can be truly deadly.
We liked Zarya a lot actually. She is fun to use and easy to learn compared to some of the other characters in the game. She definitely plays on the good side of the lore unlike the darker toned Widowmaker. Her backstory of being a weight lifting champion who has put down her personal glory to help others is a positive one. I think Zarya will be a fan favorite as more players get their hands on the game and it's certainly nice to see a female badass take to the ranks of the upcoming MMO shooter.Article By:Garrett FullerCreated On: March 10, 2015

Blizzard is reminding fans of its games that Blizzcon 2015 tickets will be on sale in a pair of events this week. The first round of tickets will go up for grabs on Wednesday, April 15th at 7:00 pm Pacific / 10:00 pm Eastern. The second batch will be on sale on Saturday, April 18th at 10:00 am Pacific / 1:00 pm Eastern.
Blizzcon 2015 will be held in Anaheim, California on November 6th and 7th.
The ticket sale site can be found at Eventbrite.

Does anyone play their PC games on a big screen tv instead of a monitor? And if so...how does it look? I heard it doesn't look as good....

__________________Beliefs - Christian. Anti-Republican. Anti-Gun. Complete separation of church and state. Freedom of speech. Freedom to practice any religion in public. Less focus on foreign lands and more focus on our own problems.

Blizzard is reminding fans of its games that Blizzcon 2015 tickets will be on sale in a pair of events this week. The first round of tickets will go up for grabs on Wednesday, April 15th at 7:00 pm Pacific / 10:00 pm Eastern. The second batch will be on sale on Saturday, April 18th at 10:00 am Pacific / 1:00 pm Eastern.
Blizzcon 2015 will be held in Anaheim, California on November 6th and 7th.
The ticket sale site can be found at Eventbrite.